


Knowledge Gaps

by dimircharmer



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Character Study, Developing Relationship, Finn and Rey have had really weird lives and Poe is doing his best here, Learning to be people, Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-30
Packaged: 2018-05-10 09:12:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5579799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dimircharmer/pseuds/dimircharmer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The gap between what you know and what you don't know can only be bridged if you're willing to make the effort. Rey and Finn are trying. Poe's doing the best he can to help.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Knowledge Gaps

**Author's Note:**

> no archive warnings, but a tiny little bit of nsfw at the end

 

This is an incomplete list of the things Rey knows:

  * How far she can walk, hike, ride, crawl between the sub-zero Jakku dawn and the blistering desert noon
  * The distance between Niima outpost, Tuanul, Reestkii and Cratertown, how long it took to travel between each to any of the others or to the remains of the AT-AT where she lived
  * How to brute-force her way into or out of any blast door in any vessel built during the Imperial War
  * The difference between heat-lightning and sandstorm clouds, the sickly purple-green of one versus the ghastly rust red of the other
  * What parts of imperial cruisers are multi-purpose, and which are one-use only, which batteries and spark plugs and valves and overrides are useless in anything but an imperial cruiser and which ones are salvageable
  * The shape of each vessel big enough to carry humanoid passengers against the starlight Jakku sky
  * How to get to sleep on an empty stomach



It is not that she knows _nothing_ , it is that what she knows will only take her between three towns and a single transport station, over the ridges and hills of her tiny, barren corner of Jakku. She knows, on some level that a war had been fought, that there was an empire, a wider galaxy, beyond Jakku’s scorching sun and endless freezing desert. It’s just that the empire, the war, the galaxy itself has always seemed both before her time and beyond her reach.

The great ship graveyards of Jakku had been inert and silent by the time she was old enough to climb the ridge by her house to see them on the horizon, back when there was a house by the ridge that she lived in. There must, she knew, be someone _up there_ who bought ship parts, -fuel cells and capacitors and hydraulic valves- but it seemed so distant from where the sand blew hot and desolate and empty through the bones of old ships on the surface that it might as well have been a galaxy away.

To see the galaxy up close and personal, to be in a ship where the drives were alive and humming, to feel the engines whirr beneath her to-many-times patched boots took her breath away. She had never known that recycled air smelled different than cold desert dust, that there was a type of cold and dry that was entirely different than desert nights. She had never known that conduit pipes would be warm in her hands, that the warmth in a ship could come from anything other the baking desert heat or that the man who owned the fastest smuggling ship in the western systems (a ship that she had _flown_ ) could make her, with a smile and a job offer, feel more at home in a junkyard ship than she had been in her AT-AT since she was a child.

Maybe -and she has always known this, she thinks- home is less about where you are as who you’re with. And with the resistance is as good a place to start a new one any she’s ever know.

This is an incomplete list of the things Rey does not know:

  * How to cook non-dehydrated meals
  * How to use water-based bathing systems
  * What to wear in the rain
  * How long she’ll be able to stay with the resistance and with Poe and Finn before she has to find Master Luke
  * How to talk to people who want her for her, not her for her credits, her parts or her speeder
  * How to use the force
  * Her last name
  * If a family, someday, will come looking for a girl with three topknots left too long on Jakku, and find nothing but an empty AT-AT and an old fighter helmet.



But, if there’s one thing the desert has taught her, it’s that she can survive anything that comes, and if the world off her world has taught her anything, it’s that she doesn’t have to do it alone.

*

This is an incomplete list of the things Finn knows:

  * How to march in step
  * The proper care and maintenance of standard order blasters, and standard order storm trooper battle armour
  * The top down chain of first-order command, from troopers like him all the way up to the field marshal stationed in some system he’s only ever seen on holoscreens
  * That any good Stormtrooper that has ever doubted has turned themselves in for reconditioning
  * He really likes holding hands
  * That a lightsaber hurts, when it carves through four different muscle groups and practically cooks three vertebra in your back
  * That his name is Finn.



 

The First order is all he’s ever known, and it was so massive there had never been anything outside worth knowing, or running to. Anything outside the First Order was an aberration, soon to be corrected, by force if necessary. The First Order’s dominance was as unquestioned as it was inevitable; there was nothing, no-one and no-where that you could go that they could not find you. Except, they had been unable to find an orange and white BB unit on Jakku, or Poe Dameron Best Pilot In The Resistance, or Luke Skywalker The Last Jedi. The first order had been failing for years before Finn had taken a breath full of smoke on a desert planet and looked around at its ruins, but it was always hard to see a sinking ship from the barracks.

Leaving the first order behind was easy, when he thought about it; all he had ever been away from escaping the first order was a damn good pilot and a stolen TIE fighter. It was something he had, apparently, had the chance to do every hundred days or less on base as prisoner shipments came in and he walked on patrol through the cavernous First Order halls. To run away from the first order, was apparently very easy. To leave it behind him was much harder.

It’s chasing him, the first order, him and the newfound friends he’s made on the run from the same. They are chasing Rey, who has never once looked at him and expected to see a helmet, who was the first person to look at him like a person, to know him as Finn first and FN-2187 never. They are chasing Poe, who had named him, joked with him, who had been by his side with Rey since he woke up in the Resistance’s medbay. The idea that the First Order would ever get their hands on either of them, that in another lifetime it could be Rey or Poe under the helmets of the Stormtroopers he now guns down without a second thought, that if he had turned himself in for reconditioning, he would be the one firing on them, that the unyielding light in Rey or the easy smile in Poe could have been snuffed out by First Order training-

He doesn’t think about it.

The people he’s with now, they’re all individual people. Different in habit and dress and speech and action, and Finn can only hope that he’s one of them someday.

This is an incomplete list of the things Finn does not know:

  * How to cook
  * Why Rey turns red when he smiles at her, or why Poe winks at either of the two of them
  * When he’ll be able to walk without help again
  * How to read facial expressions
  * How to pick his own clothing
  * If he can manage when Rey has to go off to do whatever Jedi training she has to do without him
  * How this rag-tag rebel force will ever defeat the galaxy spanning superpower of the first order



But, leaving the first order has made an optimist out of him. He thinks he can learn to adapt.

*

This is an incomplete list of the things Poe Dameron knows:

  * How to fly a T-70 x-wing, in snow or rain or radiation storm, upside-down, backwards or in zero Gs, and how to make it look good
  * How to burp the alphabet
  * That Finn looks damn good in his Jacket
  * How to cook a half dozen soups, two chilies, three pies and a single very impressive roast
  * That Rey has a smile that could light up the whole base, and laughs like she wasn’t expecting to, like she isn’t used to anyone caring enough to make her laugh
  * How to wink, grin and flirt his way through any crowd he's ever been a part of
  * That he was conceived on a victory night, that space flight and hopeless causes runs in his blood



Poe knows the resistance as closely as a second skin, was nursed in the fledgling state of the new republic, played on the jungle gyms made on old air bases during council meetings, went to school with kids who were missing one or both parents from the war as often as not. To be part of the resistance had never been a question, it was and had always been the Right Thing To Do. If he’s honest with himself (which he tries never to be) it’s what impresses him the most about Poe and Rey.

Sure, he’s thought about other options (what pilot didn’t, as a kid, want to grow up to be Han Solo, legendary smuggler?) but pilot in the resistance has always been the clear and easy path for him. Finn and Rey, who had equally easy paths, turned away from them to be big damn heroes. Rey, who balked at bodies of water larger than puddles and hummed in pleasure whenever she ate real fruit, turned her back on waiting for an absent family and is about to take up the mantle of the Jedi knight. Finn, who turns towards physical contact like a plant towards the sun, who didn’t have a _name_ half a hundred days ago, saw that the only thing he’d known all his life was wrong and made the choice not to be a part of it.

There is enough strength in the two of them to move moons, he is sure, and all he wants is to soak up their warmth. The two of them are good and unexpectedly, improbably kind and young in a way he thinks he’s never been, never mind the fact he’s only a handful of standard years older than either of them. He’s slowly, ever so slowly, coaxing Rey out of her shell and simultaneously trying to teach Finn how to make his own choices. It’s as exhilarating as any speedrun he’s ever been a part of, helping these two find their feet.

These are good people, and Poe wants to be near them as often as he can.

This is an incomplete list of the things Poe Dameron does not know:

  * Whether or not general Organa ever sleeps
  * If the Millennium Falcon really handles as well as the old stories say she does
  * If, when he sees Kylo Ren again, he’s going to be able to keep a steady hand on his blaster or if he’s going to vomit
  * How Finn can stand to go into battle again and again against Stormtroopers, knowing that anyone of them might have been a friend
  * How Rey managed to keep a custom built hoverspeeder fit and flying on a _dessert planet_ when everyone knows there’s nothing worse for engines than sand
  * If his stubble will leave beard burn on Finn’s thighs
  * If Rey will squeak when he bites her neck



He doesn’t know these things, but he’s always been a quick learner. He’s sure he can figure it out.

**Author's Note:**

> -finger guns- boy did this ship drag me down and suck me under


End file.
